Sleeping Bear

Friends from England were visiting us here on Vancouver Island. On a beautiful crisp, clear Autumn day we took them for a hike on the Holt Creek Trail by the Cowichan River; a great place to enjoy the Fall colours. It was very beautiful but it didn’t smell too great because of the rotting salmon carcasses along the river bank. We encountered one dead salmon on the trail some distance from the river. This was a bit of a mystery. The salmon was too big to have been carried by a bird and it had been bitten but not eaten. The mystery was probably solved a few minutes later when we came upon a very large bear sleeping on a log. He/she was apparently too full to finish the last fish and took a nap while digesting. We did not wake the bear, but photographed it through a zoom lens and then quietly continued along the trail, feeling very fortunate.

John Scull

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John is a volunteer environmental educator and community conservation activist living on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. He is a founding member of ICE. Visit www.naturecowichan.net to see what he does or Click Here for links to some of his articles about ecology and ecopsychology.